Rabbit Ears

When I grew up in the sixties and seventies, we had about seven television channels, and switching around within them was a breeze. Today, TVs are "smart." My TV said right on the box that it was smart, but I attribute this to the fact that smart TVs are often arrogant and boastful. Being complicated, difficult, and frustrating doesn't make you smart. 

Bunny Ears, copyright 
Teece Aronin.

Since our purchase of a smart TV, I have witnessed my kids hopscotching between Hulu, Netflicks, and YouTube and using a "streaming stick" to stream shows from other places. Sometimes they needed our game-pad to get to what they wanted to watch. When I was young, the most technically advanced procedure we might have to perform in order to watch TV was adjusting the rabbit ears or switching from UHF to VHF. 

When remotes first hit the scene, my aunt had a neighbor who would get up from her chair, cross the room to where the remote was kept on top of the TV, change the channel, then return the remote to the TV top and sit back down. In that case, the TV wasn't smart and neither was its owner.

I need at least one kid handy when I want to watch TV because I'm dumbfounded by all the equipment needed to watch one simple television show. In my defense, even my son referred to one of our recent TV tech add-ons as "that cable thing we just got." 

Last night both kids were going to be away so my daughter, Syd got me all set up to watch HGTV. She was going out the door when I asked how to change channels. Syd said, "I'm sorry, Mom, but I think we'll have to wait until I have more time." 

Then she left me all alone with nothing to keep the TV running but its smarts and mine.

The first thing I noticed is that the audio was out of sync with the video and that the video was ahead. My son tells me this is because we have a cheap internet service provider. Eventually the show I was watching shut down altogether and a message appeared on the screen saying: "Due to inactivity, playback was stopped to save bandwidth."

I sat bolt upright, with my bag of chips and yelled, "Whadda ya mean inactive?" Was I supposed to be talking to the TV? My father used to yell at ours when watching Hockey Night in Canada, but it didn't seem to improve his viewing experience and anyway, I would have thought those days were gone. If the TV was so smart, why did it need help from me?

After Syd got home, we wanted to switch to Hulu for Parks and Recreation, and it was another big process just to do that. I watched wistfully as her little fingers danced around all the stuff and like a miracle, Parks and Recreation came on.

"Syd, do you think you can teach me how to watch TV without help?"

"Oh, sure, Mom," she said. But she said it like I'd just asked if I could ever learn to build my own spaceship, and she didn't have the heart to tell me it was hopeless. 

Sweet Nothings

Sometimes in marriage it’s all about timing. Take for instance, Melrose and Ed. 

This was the early sixties and Ed worked for one of Southern Michigan’s General Motors assembly plants. He was that era's quintessential “regular Joe." He went to work in clean but faded coveralls and carried a big, black, barn-shaped lunchbox. 

And like a lot of men back then, Ed just might have been a wee bit chauvinistic.

But whatever Ed’s attitudes towards women, they did not include the conviction that after work his place was with his wife. His place, Ed felt, was with his fellow assembly workers at a neighborhood drinking establishment; the cinder-block construction, neon light illumination kind of drinking establishment.

Meanwhile, Ed’s wife, Melrose was the regular wife of the regular Joe. She stayed at home even though the kids were well out of the nest, claiming she was focused on homemaking. And she maybe wasn’t quite as on top of her appearance as when she and Ed first met. 

Melrose might also have had a tendency to meet her husband at the door (on the rare occasions he came straight home) in curlers and a house dress, the bunions on her feet peeking at Ed through threadbare slippers.

So there's a chance that each of them had reason to feel a bit resentful of the other.

One night, Ed was out at the bar knocking back a few while Melrose lay in bed dreaming of Ed’s early demise, so bitter was she over his nocturnal fellowship habits. When Ed came stumbling through the back door, Melrose didn’t hear him. 

This, of course, was before the days of cell phones when a third party could pick up the phone and either join the other two parties or just listen in, provided said person's phone was in the same residence as at least one of the others. 

When the phone rang, it startled them both, Ed in the kitchen and Melrose in the bedroom. They picked up within milliseconds of one another, Melrose assuming it was Ed and Ed with no clue who it was.

They said hello in unison before Melrose yelled: “Where the hell have you been? Do you know what time it is?”

“Hell, yes, I know what time it is!” Ed yelled back. He consulted his watch but it kept swimming around in front of his face. “By the way, what time is it?”

“It’s time your drunken carcass was here where it belongs! Why the hell aren’t you home?”

“What the hell do you mean, why the hell aren’t I home? I am home and damned if it isn’t hell!”

“Well, if you’re home, get your ass in bed!”

“My ass is in bed! It’s name is Melrose!”

“Aw, go to hell!”

“No! You go to hell!”

Ed and Melrose slammed down their receivers.

A few seconds later, Ed’s boss hung up, too.